Rue de l'Echaude
by SwordSkill
Summary: ..."It was a crisp night wind that made her gold locks billow and her skin prickle from the cold. Her apartment in Rue de l'Echaude was only some distance away from the subway station and she could walk..."


**A/N:** I was cleaning up my HD when I stumbled across a number of Noir fics that I had written but never published for some reason or another. This is one of them; just a short work written a little more than two months ago.

**Rue de l'Echaude **  
  


It was a crisp night wind that made her gold locks billow and her skin prickle from the cold. Her apartment in Rue de l'Echaude was only some distance away from the subway station and she could walk.

For her the nocturnal journey must have been agreeable. The street was empty and there was a confidence in the night. Eleven o'clock and the lampposts were in full flare, but they could blaze with hell fire and would not make a difference to her when there was only she to walk under them.

She adjusted her scarf and splashed over a puddle. There were no eyes in Rue de l'Echaude at night. Padlocks festooned the door of the bookshop and the greengrocer and the baker had vanished. Time froze after dark and her solitary presence only intensified the lifelessness of the residential street. It was as if Rue de l'Echaude had never known the rushes of its careerists for the subway station, never heard the voices of the children playing football, never seen its inhabitants nor their eyes, their human eyes that pierced into human souls and mirrored the guilt they found buried at the bottom.

It was different at night. There were no glances that seemed to count from her face the bodies left all over the city and all over the world that had been rendered inert by a bullet. There were no scrutinies that saw through the cloth which hid the gun from sight. The low-rise flats of the street slept with the residents inside them, like secrets taken down to the grave, she thought. She felt a sense of tranquility. All the lights were out and the windows were blind.

All except for one room she was approaching, she discovered with surprise. When she looked up from the foot of the building, a figure had appeared from the window, regarding her. The room was lamp-lit, like a beacon over a graveyard. The silhouette it produced was petite, but the discipline that allowed the shadow to assume the rigidity of a statue was foreboding.

A flurry of door keys and she was in the apartment. The sound of the door closing had jarred her, as it was the only sound she had heard after leaving the station. When she reached the top of the narrow stairway that led to the room, her footfalls had already stopped echoing across the corridors. The door opened before her and she dropped her keys back to her pocket.

"Why aren't you asleep yet?"

"I was waiting for you."

"You really shouldn't have. The reason I did this alone was precisely because you need rest. Do your ribs still hurt?"

"Not as much as it did this morning. How did it go?"

"Cleanly." She pulled out the gun from her breast pocket before removing her coat. "Not bad."

"Did you get hurt?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"_Certainement_. I've done this before on my own, you know, quite a number of times already."

"I didn't see the taxi."

"The taxi? Oh, that. I took the subway."

"I thought you said it would be quicker by taxi?"

"I was in the mood to take the longer route, I suppose. I like taking walks during the night, when I'm alone." Her voice was muffled as she hung her coat in the closet. "Used to take lots of them. Before."

"Oh."

She emerged, raising her hand to cover a yawn. "I'm devilishly sleepy so I'm not saying this again: it's time for you to go to bed. We'll talk tomorrow."

"I heated some tea for you in the back."

"Thanks. I'll pour myself a cup." She pulled her chair closer to the pool table. There was a faint smile on her lips.

A change, this - a change that she had always known but had not been fully aware of until now. There _were_ eyes in Rue de l'Echaude at night, a pair of eyes which, among all the others, knew the most, like her own.

Sometimes change was good.

**fin**

****

**Postscript:** Rue de l'Echaude is the name of a real street in France; there's a Japanese website out there detailing comparisons between the street where the apartment is located in the anime and with Rue de l'Echaude. I'm not one to say whether or not Bee Train really did use Rue de l'Echaude as basis, but it's as good a street name as any for me.


End file.
